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Hello to all #SportsVizSundayers from 2023! I hope you had happy holidays and enjoyed a couple of days off if you were able to.
2022 had some great sporting highlights. For me, Great Britain winning two curling medals at the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, and then being at the final to watch the Lionesses win Euro 2022 in July, were my two standout moments. I can't wait to see what 2023 brings!
The #SportsVizSunday community have still been busy and there's a fortnight of excellent visualisations to catch-up on, so let's get into it!
I'm going to start with this great visualisation from Athan Mavrantonis showing the breakdown of penalty shootouts from World Cup history. I love the small multiples showing the location of each shot, and how Athan has chosen to focus on location of the penalties, and left the team/player detail in the tooltips. There's a lot to see here so click in and have a look!
There were some exciting moments in the World Cup group stages, and Frederic Fery has created this visualisation looking specifically at group E. The final two group games happen at the same time, and Frederic has used this to show all four countries at the same time and how their group position changed in real-time - with the top 2 countries qualifying for the knockout stages.
It's almost unbelievable but each team was in the top 2 at least once and each team dropped out of the top 2 at least once in their final game! It would be a shame if the format is changed, as FIFA have indicated they would like to do.
Ken Flerlage has updated his World Cup Winners visualisation, following Argentina's victory in the most recent edition. I really like the curved lines that make up the timeline for each country, and I enjoyed being able to see the ebb and flow of success for each country. Love it!
The Premier League has been back with a bang after a World Cup break. Damola Ladipo celebrated its return with this visualisation looking at the minutes-per-goal ratio for the top forwards in the league. Haaland stands out quite a long way and has since scored a few more goals! I really like Damola's style in this visualisation - the colour palette and text choices are very clean, and I like how they've chosen to split the scatter plot into four quadrants and colour each one to show the different categories of forwards.
In American Football, Brett2point0 has highlighted the excellent defences of the San Francisco 49ers and Buffalo Bills, and particularly how they've continued to improve since week 7. Could they be Super Bowl contenders?
Moving away from various types of football, Peter Gorman made this beautiful visualisation showing each minute of an Ironman race. I love the simplicity of this visualisation, and it's a great reminder that a visualisation doesn't have to be complex to be impactful and interesting.
As well as the highs, 2022 also brought the occasional sporting low including the death of Pele, one of the greatest footballers to have ever graced a pitch. Adam Green previously created this excellent visualisation of results and scores that Pele influenced. It's a good way to remind yourself of Pele's incredible record.
Finally a couple of resources for you. Neil Richards has highlighted a great addition to the free datasets out there as StatsBomb have released their event data for the Indian Super League!
And Rob Carroll has written a great blog post on Tableau about getting started with football analytics in Tableau! He's included links to datasets and other resources, and chosen a few of his favourite people to take inspiration from (including a shout out for our very own CJ). Well worth a read if you're interested in football analytics.
As the final part of an impromptu trilogy of football analytics resources, the Asian Football Analysis Zone have published their first tutorial on data wrangling - using the new Indian Super League data! (this is a creation of Ben Griffis [@BeGriffis] who is also worth a follow if you're interested in football analytics, especially outside of the top 5 European leagues).
Lastly, DataWrapper has featured some great World Cup visualisations in this edition of their weekly Data Vis Dispatch. It's always worth a read and they cover a lot of different topics each week. Have a look and see what stimulates your creativity.
That's all for us this week. Thanks for all your visualisations and remember to use the #SportsVizSunday hashtag if you want to be featured in the weekly round-up.
I hope you all have a wonderful 2023!
Mo and the #SportsVizSunday team
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